Chapter Eight: Into the Known
From the instant he got off the bus, Kirishima was mobbed: he needed to expend quite a bit of effort to make sure he stayed close to his friends. Eraserhead had told all of Class 1-A to leave everything they didn't need behind on the bus, so the only things Kirishima took with him were his phone, his wallet, and the photocopies of the study sheets he'd made in preparation for the exam. He still needed to keep an eye on them at all times, though; anything he took with him was liable to get lost or stolen.
The line to get into the stadium stretched halfway down the block. Fortunately, the security team checking everyone for hazardous items seemed top-notch, so at least they moved along rather quickly. Twenty minutes or so later, Kirishima got scanned, and once he was cleared to enter he received a ticket with two lines of text on it: his room and seat number for the theoretical portion and his group number for the group practical portion. He'd gotten seat K-5 in Room 4 and Group 79, respectively; comparisons with his classmates proved he'd be surrounded by strangers for this exam, likely by design.
Even after he entered Takoba National Stadium, the crowding didn't ease off in the slightest. The venue had quite a lot of floor space, yet Kirishima couldn't see a single place for him to sit down without being tripped over. The place was a bedlam of movement and noise and nervous anticipation, something Kirishima contributed to quite a bit whether he wanted to or not.
That all started to change when the newest arrival stepped onto the makeshift stage that had been created near the other end of the stadium. He was a taller man with shaggy, graying blond hair and eye bags that might have alarmed someone else but paled in comparison to Eraserhead's. He wore all black and carried a microphone, and based on his demeanor, he had plenty of experience using it.
When he reached the center of the stage, he wasted no time getting started. "May I have everyone's attention, please?"
Sure enough, the room quieted down within seconds.
"Thank you, and welcome, all prospective heroes," the man said. "I am Mera Yokumiru, the officiator of this exam. I would like to welcome you to Takoba National Stadium and the first provisional Hero License Exam of the year. Before we go any further, please congratulate yourselves on even getting here: less than two percent of the population of Japan takes this exam in their lifetime, and doing so puts you in quite the esteemed company."
As far as Kirishima knew, this was perfectly normal: according to those who'd taken the exam in the past, the opening speech hardly ever changed from exam to exam. However, any security he felt got dashed a split second later as the bombshell of the day was dropped.
"Therefore, I announce the upcoming change with both regret that it is necessary and hope for a future where the average hero meets the standards we expect of you today. Normally, our goal would be to pass everyone scoring a 2100 or better on this exam, or half the examinees, whichever is lower. However, in light of recent events, we have determined that higher standards are necessary to cope with the changing state of the world. Therefore, for this exam in particular, the requirements for a passing grade have been raised: we expect to either pass everyone scoring a 2500 or better, or one-fifth of all examinees, again, whichever is lower."
A collective groan rose from everyone in the room. Kirishima groaned right along with them. He planned to place as well as he could, but bad days happened, and now if one did it doomed his chances.
"Please, do not take this as a sign of ill will towards any of you," Mr. Mera said. "Unfortunately, as the villains of the world grow stronger and smarter, we too must match their skill level if we wish to preserve society as we know it. That means we need to take on the best and the brightest, and no more. I sincerely wish everyone here the best of luck on their exam, and if all goes well, I won't be seeing you here again in September."
He departed the room after that and someone else took the stage to begin calling people up by room number, allowing Kirishima to shift his focus to his classmates. All of his friends looked just as nervous about the sudden change in standards as he did, even Bakugo. His expression hadn't changed since they'd walked in, but he'd come to recognize that tic.
Kirishima decided to reassure him the best he could; hopefully, it helped. "Good luck, Bakugo."
"Don't fuck this up, Shitty Hair," Bakugo responded.
Kirishima smiled. By Bakugo's standards, that was high encouragement.
Then, his room number was called, and Kirishima parted from his friends to join the crowd of people he'd be taking the exam alongside, albeit not in spirit. As the crowd surrounding him started following their guide, he began the long, slow walk to his exam room, keeping a smile glued to his face even as the seriousness of the situation set in once and for all.
The room Izuku took his theoretical exam in had been set up to prevent any attempts at cheating: students from the same school sitting as far apart as possible, partitions between every seat to block roving eyes, cameras and scanners everywhere to detect any illicit devices, and much more that he didn't notice at the moment. He would have asked himself how the exam could have been made more secure, but he already knew the answer: Room 12, designed to accommodate examinees with cognitive Quirks, had even stricter security measures.
After he sat down, a few minutes of relative unease trickled by as everyone settled in. Some of his neighbors tried starting conversations even through the partitions, but Izuku wasn't one of them: he wasn't in a chatty mood at the moment.
That state of affairs didn't last long. Once the person in charge of this operation, a man with dark skin and ears of an almost comical size, called attention to the room, everyone quieted down in a hurry.
"Thank you for your attention," he said. "Before we begin the theoretical portion of the exam, allow me to go over the rules and regulations binding both you and us in this room."
Izuku couldn't dream of trying to cheat on an exam with stakes this high, but he listened as those rules and regulations were covered anyway. The least he could do was keep his brain working.
Once he finished that, the man shifted to covering the content of this portion of the exam, which Izuku had reviewed time and time again in the past few weeks. It had three sections: two written-response with three questions each (the first section touching upon Hero law, publicity, and common procedures while the second dealt exclusively with practical scenarios) and one multiple-choice with forty questions (which covered everything). He could do the sections in any order he chose, and he didn't have to finish one before starting another. He had to answer as many multiple-choice questions as he could, one question from each of the written-response sections and three written-response questions in total. All of this had to be done in two hours or less.
The waiting was driving Izuku to madness: he'd never bitten his nails before, yet he desperately wanted to just to make the agony stop. Before he resorted to that, though, his administrator reached the last paragraph of his speech and everything changed.
"Make sure you mark which written-response questions whose answers you want to be evaluated in the appropriate area when you're done with that section," the man said. "Your two hours start now."
Izuku expected most of the others to do the exam in something resembling its original order, but he bucked that trend and flipped straight to the final section. While the written and multiple-choice sections carried the same weight in determining your final result, he felt far more confident in his ability to work out larger scenarios: if he could do this, then a good portion of the multiple-choice section would be over in seconds.
Grabbing a pencil to start marking anything important, he read the first prompt of the section he'd flipped to. "You have been ambushed by four villains with currently-unknown Quirks while walking home from work alone. Pro heroes are on their way to assist you, but will take a few minutes to arrive. Standard hero protocol applies. Assume none of these villains have precognitive Quirks or Quirks that affect your brain. Assume the location of the attack is an average city block. Describe how you would best handle this scenario in 300 words or less."
He didn't have a clear answer yet, but he had all the components ready. Mumbling under his breath, he began scribbling notes in the margins of his paper, trying to raise as many points as possible. "Okay. Disregarding not letting the villains kill you, protecting the bystanders probably comes first; an average city block isn't deserted, and the fight turning into a hostage scenario would only make things worse. From there, I might not be able to figure out all the nuances in these villains' Quirks before backup arrives, but I could still get an overall idea so they better know how to take them down. If they're not going after the bystanders and their Quirks are easy enough to identify, my goal should be to keep property damage to a minimum and keep them in range so the other pros can help me apprehend and arrest them. If they go for hostages, talk them down peacefully if possible, and if that isn't going to work, stall them until help arrives."
His train of thought having reached its destination, he began to put his answer in writing, his wrist almost a blur as he penned his response. He followed the same process for the other scenario prompt of his choice, this one concerning a rescue operation carried out in treacherous terrain. His third and final question, this one about determining potential PR measures in the wake of a disgraced sidekick, took a bit more effort, but he believed he still put together something reasonable.
"You have one hour remaining," someone said right as he finished the last sentence. Izuku took that as a good sign; it meant he'd paced himself well.
It was more time than Izuku needed. He flew through the multiple choice without much issue; the only thing he noted was that a lot more scenario questions than usual concerned groups of villains rather than lone troublemakers. There were plenty of ways that could be taken, but for him, it meant the League of Villains' influence had grown large enough that the exam had been changed to better gauge how prepared heroes were to face them.
He had all the multiple-choice questions answered with maybe fifteen minutes left on the clock. He went back to the free-response sections, added a few new points to the sidekick question, then flipped through the multiple-choice one last time for any answers he might want to change. One or two he reread and switched his answer, but for everything else, he stuck with his gut.
When time was called, Izuku was sure he'd given the best performance he could. He just had to hope that it'd be enough.
Ojiro entered the solo exam with his shoulders no lighter than before. The theoretical exam had gone pretty alright, all things considered: only one or two of the multiple-choice questions truly stupefied him and he'd put together cogent answers for all three of his chosen questions. Still, alright wasn't enough to guarantee he'd pass, especially this year when the standards had jumped from years gone by.
Right now, he could relax for a moment if he wanted to: everyone was given a fifteen-minute break before the solo practical exam, which was used primarily so the administrators had time to set everything up and wait for any stragglers to wrap up their theoretical portion. He didn't feel capable of relaxing, though, and based on what he heard from everyone around him, that feeling was reciprocated by the rest of the room.
About halfway through the break, several newcomers entered the class, each of them wheeling a cart containing the headsets they'd use for the solo practical portion of the exam. The rate of technological developments may have slowed as designers suddenly had to alter everything they made to accommodate Quirks, but it never came anywhere close to stopping: full-dive devices in particular had been celebrated as one of the most valuable technologies of the century. For the sake of practicality, this portion of the exam was done using those devices; the ratio of people to available floor space was too large for anything else to make sense.
When all the headsets were in the room and the fifteen-minute break was up, his administrator began a similar speech to the one that started the theoretical portion. If nothing else, this one went by much more quickly. "This portion of the exam is a sequence of simulations designed to last two hours. If your headset is broken or does not turn on, please press the red button on the side or inform an administrator and a new one will be provided for you. In the event your exam ends early, you may remove your headset if you wish, but tampering with another person's headset will result in being removed from the venue and your score being invalidated. Please put on your headsets, and I wish you the best of luck."
Ojiro saw others put on their devices, and he did the same with his. For now, it displayed nothing but a clock counting down to the start of the exam, which currently showed three minutes and thirty-seven seconds in a simple green font.
Not much else happened as that clock ticked down. The voices of those who needed new headsets broke the silence on occasion, but for the most part, Ojiro was free to close his eyes and disappear into limbo as he mentally prepared himself for the test to come. He'd practiced as much as he could, gone over past exams time and time again, and trained alongside the best of the best: if that didn't help him pass, that said more about him than anything else, and he wouldn't accept that as an option.
Before he knew it, the timer dwindled to zero, and the second it did, everything went black for one horrifying second before the world dissolved into a maelstrom of color.
Ojiro jolted back to reality in the midst of what looked like a public park, sparsely populated but not empty. He stood on what looked like a dirt path surrounded by grass, several nearby trees reaching for the sky. His surroundings were open enough that he could see the park was surrounded by tall buildings; he seemed to be in the midst of a city. Perhaps this was some simulacrum of Tokyo, but he didn't recognize enough of the architecture to confirm that.
He didn't feel his tail, which would have been weird had he not known how the exam worked: to make evaluations more objective, during this portion of the exam everybody was given the same Quirk, usually a simple one that required little explanation. The Quirk in question changed every exam, but it almost always was either a general athletic boost or a basic emitter.
Sure enough, a text box popped up in his peripheral vision explaining the Quirk all examinees had this time around, though it was a bit more complex than he might have expected. "Quirk: Orientation - users can change their gravity to be relevant to any object larger than them in their line of sight. When the object completely leaves the user's sight line for more than one second or becomes smaller than they are, the user's gravity returns to normal. You may switch from one object to another without gravity returning to normal in between, but overusing your Quirk leads to rapidly intensifying vertigo. Be warned: in this simulation, you will revive after fatal injuries, but your score will be severely penalized as a result."
Ojiro tried to remain upbeat. Even if this Quirk didn't fit the parameters he'd been trained on, it wasn't that complicated, and it had a wide variety of practical applications in Heroics; he bet Izuku was going nuts right now. By that logic, the simulations were likely designed around this Quirk or at least with it in mind; as long as he figured out how it worked quickly enough, this portion of the exam couldn't be that much harder than normal.
At the moment, nothing seemed to be happening, which struck him as rather unusual based on what he knew. Perhaps the creators of this exam realized this Quirk was a difficulty spike compared to the ones of years past, so they'd given examinees a few extra minutes at the beginning to discern how it worked. Ojiro had no plans to waste that time; he wanted to be as prepared as he could for what was to come.
Walking over to the nearest tree, he decided to try out his new Quirk. Sure enough, as soon as he focused on the tree, the world shifted, causing him to fall into its trunk. He managed to pull himself to his feet and maintain his balance, walking up and down the side of the tree several times before he looked away, undoing his gravity shift and sending him back to earth. His landing was a bit rougher than he would have liked, his lack of tail meaning he was nowhere near as steady as usual, but he made do.
Right then and there, an earsplitting beep broke the silence, Ojiro receiving a notification via the same means he'd been fed information about this Quirk. "Alert: Villain sighted on the roof of building approximately 0.6 miles northwest of your current location, hostage situation confirmed. Detain them promptly and with as little collateral damage as possible."
He took that notification to heart. Using the current time and the location of the sun, Ojiro oriented himself in approximately the right direction and then started running. Endurance didn't threaten to be a problem yet, though; even though the building was over half a mile away in a straight line (longer, if you stayed on the path), the race didn't even wind him.
Once he reached the building, reality set in. The easy part of the journey was over. Perhaps calling this the hard part was a bit much considering the Quirk he'd been given, but it could turn into an unmitigated hell in a hurry if he made a mistake.
He focused on the building he needed to scale and felt the world shift around him once more, but this time his preparation paid off: his landing on the side of the building was a bit clumsier than he would have liked, but it only set him back half a step. Charging up the side of a building as easily as he could run down the sidewalk felt more than a bit wrong, but he didn't look down and kept himself focused.
Once he reached the top, he slowed down, continuing to focus on the building, then he stepped off the edge and the world shifted once more. He landed neatly on its roof, gravity functioning as normal even before Ojiro looked away.
There only seemed to be one villain in the area at the moment, a tower of a man who seemed to have augmented his body with anything he found lying around, holding a girl at knifepoint as he walked her toward the edge of the building. However, when he noticed Ojiro, while his grip on the girl's arm tightened, his attention shifted. "Try to save her and we both fall."
"You don't need to do this," Ojiro said, trying to talk the villain down while moving for a more strategic position. "I'm not sure what drove you to do this, but hurting or killing her won't solve your problems."
"I don't care, my fate was determined long ago," the villain responded. "This is just me formalizing—"
He never finished his sentence, due to Ojiro using him as the basis for his next gravity change. A punch wouldn't have done much to a villain that large and armored, but falling into him with his full weight seemed to do the trick. He staggered backward, losing his grip on the girl as Ojiro slammed into him, knocking him perilously close to the edge of the building. The villain recovered his footing and made another dash for the girl, but Ojiro repeated the same trick from a different direction to knock him down, this time sending his knife flying before it landed with a clatter near the corner of the roof.
A race for the knife ensued, which the villain unfortunately won. He stooped to grab it, but then Ojiro tackled once more, which managed to topple the villain. His head hit the ground with a nasty crack, and he didn't rise again. That hadn't been what Ojiro intended, but he supposed it worked.
Ojiro hoped he got back up from that, albeit not anytime soon: he hadn't wanted to kill the man, but considering his goal was to detain the villain, he hadn't been given anything useful in terms of capture weapons. Keeping half an eye on him in case he started moving again, he instead turned to address the girl the villain had been threatening.
"Don't worry," Ojiro said. "You're safe now. Are there any other villains that came after you?"
"Not that I know of," the girl responded. "Thank you."
"It's all part of the job," Ojiro said. "No need to thank me."
From there, everything resolved even without his intervention. Several others that Ojiro assumed were pro heroes arrived and began to deal with the downed villain. The girl entered the building using a door he hadn't seen, likely beginning to return wherever she'd been taken from. As a result, Ojiro considered his objective accomplished as well as possible.
Then, about a block away, an explosion rattled the nearby buildings, causing Ojiro to wobble on his feet. Screams cut through the air and sirens followed within seconds; he wouldn't need any notifications to figure out where he needed to go next. He thought that saving the girl would have moved him to the next simulation, but it looked like this one had multiple parts. Very well. If it wasn't done yet, then neither was he.
With four hours of exam behind her, Hagakure was glad for the built-in lunch break. She needed as much energy as she could get for the group practical portion, and her stomach was screaming at her for sustenance. Now, both of those needs would have a chance to be satisfied.
While some of the sponsors for this exam had set up stalls selling bites to eat, Hagakure had brought her own lunch; she considered herself at least decent in the kitchen and everything here had to be marked up to hell and back. While some of her classmates got on lines to get something, she started eating right away, trying to savor every bite of her meal but struggling against her appetite.
Despite her stomach begging her for more, she kept her meal light: the group practical exam, often cited as its most important section even if all three got weighed the same, loomed ahead, and vomiting in the middle of it would make a terrible first impression on her groupmates. Furthermore, in all likelihood that would be her only impression on them: groups were always scrambled as best as possible to prevent pre-existing friendships from giving anyone an advantage.
She finished her lunch, then quickly realized that perhaps she should have packed a little less water. Fortunately, at the moment it didn't matter too much. Another reason she appreciated the break: it meant she could use the bathroom without it being a huge hassle.
The route to the provided bathrooms had been marked with brightly colored arrows and signs before Hagakure had even arrived, but once she arrived, she found both girls' bathrooms mobbed: she'd be lucky to even get her turn before the break ended. She debated whether or not she could hold it, came back negative, then kept walking. There had to be another bathroom somewhere in the facility.
She didn't get very far, though; as soon as she turned a corner away from the masses, one of the workers monitoring the hallways, an unassuming man with brown hair and matching eyes, stepped in front of her, causing Hagakure to stop on a dime. Maybe the HPSC hired people with sensory Quirks for this job to make things easier for them. Either way, though, he'd gotten Hagakure's attention, and he didn't look like he was about to ask for an autograph.
The first thing he said felt like an ice cube rubbing against her spine. "Where are you going, and why do you have to be invisible to do it?"
"Looking for another bathroom, I swear," Hagakure said. "The labeled ones are full, and I can't wait until the end of the line. And I'm kind of always invisible, I'm not trying to hide anything."
A long, stressful pause. Then the man spoke. "Wait. You're Invisible Girl from U.A., aren't you?"
Hagakure flashed a thumbs-up, hoping he'd recognize the pose so she'd be believed.
"Okay, then you're probably not trying anything sneaky, your principal would kill you," the man said. "I'll walk you to the closest one."
"Thank you," Hagakure said.
The two of them set off at a brisk walk. Sure enough, a few indistinct halls later, a bathroom, albeit one far less clearly marked, came into view, one which Hagakure made grateful use of. The man waited outside, presumably just to make sure she didn't try to sneak into the ceiling vents or something ridiculous like that, and Hagakure went about her business.
Right as she'd flushed, though, something halted her exit from the bathroom. She heard the man outside the door saying something, although what he said was too garbled between the door and his frantic speed. Before she could figure anything else out, his voice was interrupted by a loud clang!
The thud immediately following made Hagakure jolt in place. She didn't know for sure what had happened outside, but it couldn't be pretty. Having wrapped up, she considered sticking her head outside to see if everything was alright, but then the door, previously still, began to creak open extra slowly.
A combination of fear and curiosity got the better of her. Taking great care to avoid making noise, Hagakure climbed onto the toilet, making sure her gloves weren't visible over the top of the stall, and locked her gaze on the door.
Mere seconds later, someone slipped into the bathroom and closed the door behind them in silence. She was a woman with lime-green skin and matching hair, wearing the uniform that all the exam proctors Hagakure had seen had been wearing. She had her phone out and appeared to be in the midst of a conversation, which was a bit weird, but hey, maybe she'd gotten an urgent call about sensitive subject matter and needed to take it somewhere private. It wasn't the worst place she could have been by a long shot.
When the woman held her phone away from her like a live grenade and spun around several times, that set Hagakure on edge. When she peeked under Hagakure's stall door, that sounded every alarm in her head. For a terrifying second, she thought she'd been spotted, but when the door to her stall wasn't thrown open, it seemed like she'd escaped detection for now.
The woman put her phone to her mouth, which made Hagakure cringe a little; given their location, that couldn't be sanitary. "Place is empty, I'm all set. Do you have the coordinates?"
Whoever was on the other end gave some kind of garbled response. Somehow, Hagakure tensed further.
"Then it's go time," the woman said. "Do the thing."
Hagakure had half a mind to ask her what she meant by that, but well before she finished debating whether she could risk blowing her cover, the temperature in the room began to plummet as the far end of the room erupted into the maelstrom of her nightmares.
Something broke in Hagakure's brain. For a few seconds, she just stared blankly, watching the swirl of deep purple mist coalesce into one of the portals she'd come to know and despise.
Then, right as the first limb reached through, her legs finally caught up with the rest of her and she burst out of the stall and into the hallway. A litany of loud curse words behind her quickened her pace: if she got caught, she could easily take Bakugo's place, or worse. If being held in captivity by the League of Villains shook someone with so much willpower, she didn't want to know what it did to her.
Loud footsteps pounding behind her only sent her nerves further into overdrive. As far as she knew, she was the only person who could warn the rest of the stadium about what was to come, and if she failed to do that in time, it would haunt her for the rest of her life.
Initially, I expected this chapter to be another 3,500 words maximum, but then I let Izuku start going off and everything exploded from there: thus, here's another longer-than-usual chapter. Hopefully, you found my version of the Hero License Exam (what you saw of it, anyway) interesting, even if I can't say it was the most original take on it under the sun.
Chapter 9 is looking like an absolute monster: I'm probably going to split it in two based on how the upcoming battle is looking. If nothing else, that'll mean I have time to work out the rest of the story: I have an ending in mind, but I've still got some work to do before we can get there.
Next time, things get messy, both for me and for the heroes. Thanks for reading this far, and I hope to see you here again on the 21st!